Joe Rogan - Derren Brown Explains Hypnosis

and so right when I first saw I might like I started my career as a hypnotist and I saw this sky performing at University and I I just thought I'm gonna I'm gonna do that I just I didn't realize at the time all these boxes that it was ticking you know performing that sort of you know need for affirmation and and and love and center of attention and also the control aspect of it you know the kind of um you know the control aspect I'm not also the kind of people that particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and you know and respond well to it tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would really intimidated me before so that was late at an unconscious level and I hope I've grown out of that now mainly but yeah it takes a lot of ticks a lot of boxes so that that was that's how I started in the I'm just definitely driven by insecurity because eddies are any sort of magic which should have followed for me on from the hypnosis you basically it is the quickest most fraudulent route of impressing people that's you know the subtext is only look at me aren't I great which is not that interesting after after a while so I'll try to mean it as I as I've grown up I tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off that's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show us at a comedy show I know it was sort of I would mainly perform it like colleges and I'd do a demonstration and then have questions and after questions and answers afterwards and I wasn't making people look stupid it was an entertainment show and I guess it was kind of you know funny but it was it was it's just a really interesting thing and yeah trouble with doing it on stage is of course it gets mixed up with people just kind of playing along and stuff so it's but if you take that out of it it's just a really interesting error and I've done this stuff for you know 20 years back home no I don't think of myself as a hypnotist that was just kind of where I started but the that the suggestion based techniques of that is something I've continued where then brought into different areas and I still don't fully understand it you know now it's there's you can never quite climb in you know inside someone's head and know what they're experiencing like I used to do in there what I used to do these like stage hypnosis shows the last thing I did was - I'd tell these people on stage that I was invisible right and I'd I'd float something through the air right like this bottle I've got here and it's normally something big I like a chair and they'd be freaking out and you know running off stage and so on but afterwards when I'd had this kind of Q&A I'd um I'd ask them what was short what was your actual experience like like the show's over now be honest what were you what were you experiencing and you'd get some people that would say well yeah you were obviously just floating that you were just holding it but I kind of felt like I had to play along and then you'd get this interesting error in the middle of of like well I kind of right now on I think back yes of course it was you but I it was and I sort of knew it was you but I app emotionally just completely I could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was so that's a bit like an actor like getting caught up in a role I guess like they know they know they're on stage and it's a character but nonetheless emotionally committed and at the other extreme people that would not accept that it was me floating it just they that must have been on a wire or something there's no there's no way that I can drop you back at the picture in my memory of that thing so how do you know how do you how do you judge what that experiences ones and and are those people that are saying no you were really invisible are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects and then in that group how do you tease it all apart it's that is that is that that must be a real issue right the people that just want to please you and are playing along how can you tell if you were yeah I can tell but I the way I use it now is kind of I use it quite sort of subtly in the show I don't like overtly you know hypnotized people so that means what can mean one of two things and other means it just I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create the effect with someone hypnotized they need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work in which case I have to filter out anybody playing along but occasionally occasionally it doesn't matter like a lot of the time like I'll get people up on stage and I'll shake their hand and they're this and rapid handshake induction that the guy did you know just falls to the floor and there are times that that matters and they have to be that has to be a really honest response other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated and but for the 2,000 people looking that might look they kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter exactly does that work the handshake induction yeah well it's it's a I take no responsibility for explaining this to your tens of millions of listeners and viewers but it's it's your you're interrupting a an automatic process right this is the this is the key to it it was made popular by made popular by I guess Richard Bandler who's the guy behind NLP and so on I don't if he kind of created this thing but perhaps perhaps Erikson did before him I don't know anyway you-you-you take an automatic process and you interrupted in the middle so like when you're shaking hands with somebody that's a such a familiar process that when you start you're not thinking okay I'm gonna grip this person's hand now and I'm gonna move my hand up and down with them a few times then I'll take my handle wait you just kind of do it automatically and there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really it really caught off guard like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says it's not half-past seven you know your reaction isn't to go yeah yeah I know it's 20 past nine your reaction is this sort of you you think like you've missed something like you're trying to make sense of it it's a strange kind of puts you on the back foot and at that point if you if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible and people coming up on stage it's such an odd moment for them anyway they're naturally very suggestible that a clear instruction to sleep or whatever you want to give them tends to be taken very deeply and very often then you'll see I don't shake hands and I'll I'll break the pattern at the handshakes well I'll often take their hand and lift it up to their face and say sleep and show them their hand like that and they just sleep and well it's not sleep but it's a kind of it looks like I mean they they'll do anything from eyes closed head drops down to just drop like a like a dead weight on the floor you know I found this most interesting actually was I like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of like a self-defense technique I was walking between so I was like must have been like 20 or something and I was at a magic convention and I was walking from one hotel to another and I'm dressed like a 3-piece velvet suit as this skinny British like might as well have you know punch me in the throat tattooed across my face and this guy comes up and he's like oh he's drunk it's about 3:00 in the morning drunk aggressive is with his girlfriend clearly looking for a fight and he sort of he comes up to me and he says what are you what are you [ __ ] looking at what you looking at and because I had spoken about this how to deal with this sort of thing but had never found myself in this situation I kind of had it all mentally rehearsed so I said to him I said the war outside my house isn't 4 foot high and I guess there's an equivalent to this with a sort of adrenaline dump I think is called in in martial arts but there's a it's just like he's got all this adrenaline and then a thing like that from me which is just out of context like it makes sense I'm not like talking gibberish it makes sense but it's just out of context so now suddenly he's thinking I've what I've missed something so now he he was sort of you went what and I said and the girlfriend walked off and I said though the wall outside my house isn't for for I I spent some time in Spain the walls that were very high but if you look at the ones here that they're tiny they're nothing and then he just sort of broke down he's delivered and started crying well you know II know I wasn't quite crying but it was just it was like all the adrenaline and everything just just flooded out of him and he sat down and I end up sitting next to him on the like you know on the roadside asking him you know so what I was the plan was I was gonna try and stick his feet to the floor and I'd his hoping he just kind of collapsed and sat down so yeah that was because I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible stay and either way the moment of aggression and past but I ended up ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening and his girlfriend I think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible at her so he'd got out with all this aggression but it's a good wasn't it if you just have like um it could be just a song lyric or just some some weird kind of thing that you can just go into is in those situations that I mean if someone's running you with a knife it's a bit difficult but you just you you're kind of strangely taken control of a situation otherwise what you're gonna do if they say what are you looking at you can't there's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot so it just kind of nicely kind of inverts the situation and put them on the back for which anyway worked it was it was kind of fun isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone you could just do it that way and saying it just talked them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor I it it all depends on the moment I had to hypnotize people in my in my room when I was a student right so I was the guy that did hypnosis what have people coming you know regularly coming to try it out and I this this one time I used to leave people with like if they were responsive to it and this was like I was really early days just like you know 20 minutes half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting this their hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them so kind of you know kind of basic stuff but I would leave them if they were very suggestible with the instruction that when you come back if I click my fingers you'll go back into the sleep state and they you know they kind of get conditioned to that and you know it'll often work even like a week later and this guy came and I thought I'd seen him before I thought he'd been on a previous week so he sat down and okay look at me and sleep click my fingers and he went out whatever that means right and then we did whatever it was maybe you know perhaps he wanted to stop smoking or his hands floating in the air whatever it wasn't at the end of it I realized in talking today hadn't met him before so then I'm like well how did how did why did you respond to me clicking my fingers and because I don't have magic fingers there's nothing like anything going on here other than and I realized it was just that it was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it and the fact fortuitously that he was also very suggestible and put those two things together it that's what made it work it was just that that psychological moment for him that was more important than the nature of the 20 minutes script that I'd been learning and using up to that point so that was kind of a that was a seminal so your confidence in that he had already been under yeah I didn't question it because I believed he had and it just kind of it just sort of happened and then he just if he hadn't been a suggestible type then it probably wouldn't have worked yeah but luckily he was and that kind of really really changed the way that I that I you know thought about hypnosis and also started this you know this realization that ultimately my kind of toolkit with what I do is is the stories that people are telling themselves that's that's kind of that's really you know all there is even a magician showing you a car trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story edit edit this event in such a way that you go oh you know I picked a card and then it disappeared it wasn't it was in my pocket he never went near me and you read it out all the bits that don't seem important like when he complimented you on your jacket earlier on in the day and may have stuck a card in there or the bit he took the card back for a moment whatever because you don't you know you're you're being sold a story with particular sort of edit points and you know to me that's interesting because that's what that's what life is you know we have this infinite data source coming at us and we can we just we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make to make sense I think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians and so on I think there's something there's something interesting at the heart of it I think that that a storytelling capacity is endlessly fascinating to me well it's fascinating in that regard but it's also fascinating that it's seen there seems to be like some cheat code to the human mind like there's a there's a way you can like lock into act an admin panel and all sudden you're doing things like telling people they don't really don't want to be smoking or putting them into this hypnotic mindset by just snapping your fingers and saying sleep like it's I don't think I don't think it is that I think it looks like that and that's the problem because it look it it it's you so often see it when performers are doing it when they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect if you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated it isn't like that at all it's much more kind of boring in a way doesn't doesn't have any theater attached to it it's much more on you know kind of intuitively understandable had like been hypnotized or so I'm terrible I'm a really bad really bad subject I had one experience where I only one when I was in like a workshop thing that I was there is a like a you know paying person I wasn't giving the workshop and I was sat with the exercise was it really worked for me it might work for others so you split into pairs and the idea is you start to describe the scene so you sound upset with this woman you close your eyes you start to describe a scene and you go back and forth adding details right so she says I have a cam laying on a beach and I'm so I just imagine that like okay hang on a beach and I can I can feel the warmth of the Sun on my face so I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining him at the story and then I just remember somebody going okay guys time up time for lunch and I I had been on Abbi I had beat on a beach and I had completely just I'd been there like a dream it was completely real at some point it tipped into that that's the only experience I've had of it other than that I don't respond to I'm just not I think it's just it's just suggestibility it's something about and we get it when you know we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that or all the way we absorb opinions of people that we admire and experts that we admire how we just more easily take those on board unquestioningly this is all the same thing it's just suggestion the trouble is is it most of the time it's done through the world of the performing hypnotist which isn't isn't giving really very clear and fair view of what's of what's going on because it's so theatrical and so yeah because you often you you know you're you're relishing in things like I click my fingers in the sky wind asleep yeah but that's not really you know the what are they doing their car they just I think it's kind of responding because you've just asked them to and you they know that when you click the fingers they're supposed to go to sleep is there's a real range of possible experiences that you might look like a power but it doesn't mean it is they might just be just complying yeah I don't I was gonna do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that this I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without and I was having this discussion with my friend Andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me and I was saying like that thing of you know when you when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an onion and says you know this is a classic hypnotic stunt give him a raw onion and says it's a delicious juicy Apple now ease it and enjoy and you clear it somebody munching into an onion and like having no problem eating it I'm sure that feels like if you're just gonna pull it off without hypnosis what that just happen anyway and Andy said I bet I bet you can just do it anyway Andy went to my fridge took out an onion took a big bite of it and it was fine because he's right so he's proving a point there right so he's in a different mental state than somebody going god I'd a to take a bite of that onion when suddenly I you're pre-empting the you know the disgust and all the reasons not to do it but the fact that he was just going I bet you can do it and trying to prove a point man he did it and it was fine so that that was a different mental state and it worked oh that wasn't hypnosis but the end result still if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first it would look like you've done something amazing so I don't know is it it's it's to me it's just it's just that story that someone's telling themselves what didn't it did it taste like an onion to him reduce yes it just it's just it would have no no no it would have tasted like an onion I there was no such a demilitarized does it taste like an apple to them well I don't know it's like invisible or one of that what are they seeing I think for some of them it will you know taste and pain and things like that and discomfort it's all very subjective but the end result of doing this thing that looks like it couldn't happen without some magical process that's the key and none of these things really demand that met even when even when you look at people being undergoing surgery through hypnosis and being wide awake and being cut open so you think well that must be evidence the hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise but it of course it can you know the layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin so once you get through that when you're moving organs around that's not that's not a painful process anyway plus very funny and to use a bit a little bit of like a local anaesthetic anyway just to numb that very top layer of skin so again what looks amazing very often isn't it's a it's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me and I kind of as I said I don't really think of myself as a hypnotist but the that process that kind of ability for people to get into this space where they could have that kind of experience is is something I you know I'll always find interesting one of the recent stage shows I did it's called miracle and if you've seen it but I'm faith healing in the second half so using exactly the same idea and I've I've got an audience that are like me you know they don't believe in that I'm saying look I'm you know I'm an atheist I don't believe in this either but will you just kind of go with me on least at the start because the results are are really interesting and I I just started doing this this faith healing not really knowing if it was going to work I thought well I can get some adrenaline going and I know could see the techniques that the the charlatans faith healers were using and I thought well I just you know I'll do that and I thought well the adrenaline kills pain so if I can get some adrenaline going there's bound to be people that said oh no I had a pain in my back and now it's gone but the actual results admittedly with like small percentages of the audience right not everybody but the people that were coming up and saying I had this problem and now it's gone and there was a woman that had a she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since a kid and she's like in her forties now she's in floods of tears going I could move my arm and this was this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind of playing along with something and nonetheless again small percentage not not not everybody but having having these kind of experiences it is so that's less a psychological component of suffering which yeah which is which was really eye-opening doing that show night after night after night well faith healing is gonna be a form of hypnosis right yeah it's all this exactly it's the same world it's plain that they both well they're both joined by is is the idea of suggestibility and it doesn't and sometimes those healings are sort of I mean if you take an x-ray before and afterwards nothing's changing but in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component it can can't really make a difference to get as the percentages are getting smaller so 3,000 people in the audience 300 people come up ten people come up on stage and I'm you know involving them in the show but getting even smaller there are people that like a year later again in touch and say just so you know that thing did actually clear like it hasn't come back because I thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage and then yeah which is why you don't tell people to throw the pills away and so on but a rim probably like that half a percent now which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary but it was like a real a real thing so and what's still if you had two hundred people and one of them actually isn't cured from that mm-hmm that is immensely bizarre it's immensely bizarre but it's it's bizarre and and I'm like I had this bad shoulder for a long time and I I got really used to when I put a jacket on kind of putting this in my left arm putting it in like letting my left arm go dead and then using my right arm to pull the thing up right now I don't know how much I really need to do that anymore or whether I'm just doing it out of habit but if somebody got me up on stage and said your left shoulder is healed it's happened now and kind of made me feel a bit booked now go on try it try and move you move your arm I think in the surprise of it and the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like this is my dead arm I probably would be very surprised that I can actually move it as much as I can you know it's just it's like when you break it down it's like not that amazing but when you when you would you see the the the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that it's is mind-blowing and then you realize how these performers how you start to go mad yourself and think well I've got this special gift and mmm I could pack out stadia doing like I did think of one point why don't I do like a secular healing show I can say well this is it's just you know it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for ten minutes but it certainly works in some meaning of the word anyway I didn't do that but you know you can start to go mad

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 1,350,215

Rating: 4.8441525 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of, Derren Brown, hypnosis, mentalist, magician

Id: IFeL7XGwJTs

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/film_guy01]

So... Hypnosis is basically the placebo effect at work?

Also he mentions NLP. I know he talks about using that to the people he's performing for... But I thought thst had been thoroughly debunked? Is he still "in character" here pretending it's a thing?

[u/leepopsicle1]

A great interview. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it.

[u/[deleted]]

RIP my recommendations, but here we go.

[u/Mccall123123]

I love JRE so mich